Blake Butler aims his telescope at the future, and if what he finds there and shows us in Scorch Atlas even approaches the truth, we can all only hope we won't be around to see it.

I'm reluctant to refer to this full-length debut as a novel, even as a novel-in-stories. It's more a tour, a guided circuit of a ruined world. And it's less post-apocalyptic than it is contemporary, less aftermath and more in the heat and squelch of a horrid, horrifying end. "I let my baby witness the swan dive of our destruction . . . the way the world had come to rash . . . and how the ground would split apart . . . the pastures of dead cattle already rotten . . . the mayonnaise on the sandwich no one would ever eat and the babies with their hair tongues like my baby here like mine." The people in this world, regular folks, moms and dads and kids, can't do much amid the chaos except let it unfold around them and do their best to stay afloat or uncut or breathing.

The sky is, throughout, an enemy — it rains soil and gravel and glass. "Above, the sky made bubble, blurred with humid grog." A sentence like that might come as surprise in other books. Not here. Scorch Atlas doesn't make its point with narrative arc or character development or paragraphs or even the lovely, terrible sentences. Instead, it's the heaping of words — mauled bubbled clods knotted clogged rot foam mold growth cragged bugged curdle boils lumps ooze gunk stung and on and on — that press on you, as if you were being buried, drowned, dissolved, as if you were about to swallow your tongue.

In "Television Milk," three untamed sons make their mother a captive. They tie her down and suck her breasts. "Tum — awkward and fumbly, just near an age he might have begun to dream of women — he took my nipple in his mouth with his arms crossed over his chest, eyes anywhere but on me." In "The Ruined Child," a mother and father drown their baby because "where once he'd had the father's features, his skin expunged a short white rind." The baby comes back, though, and grows to monstrous size, inhabiting the attic and prognosticating with a "runny mouth."

Although the characters have memories of a better time, hope does not spring eternal. Or at all. In "Caterpillar," one of the 13 shorts that precede each story, "wriggling ropes of segmented flesh" infest the world. Even the transformation into butterflies proves a horror: "In the end, the great unveiling: ten billion butterflies humming in the sun, fluttering so loud you couldn't think." Butler's integrity is patent; you never get the sense of gross-out for the sake of gross-out. (His vow that he'll eat his book, one page at a time, for you to watch on-line is another story: he pours ketchup and hot sauce onto a shredded page two and forks it into his mouth.)

Close readings The JCA has been at it since 1985, a collective of musicians who are primarily composers rather than players, in need of an outlet to hear their pieces.

Thanaphobe Novelist Julian Barnes is a brilliant writer, but he’s not self-revelatory.

Bad girls People tend to make much of what they think of as Mary Gaitskill's fictional realm, a place of sexual transgression, of violence, violation, rape, and sado-masochism, and her female characters, the violated, the used, the users.

Interview: Michael Lang "At the end, he talks about how wonderful it was, but throughout the entire day, Pete Townshend was like the Grinch that stole Christmas. He was uptight, miserable, hated being there, and wanted to go home."

Loss leader The stories in Jill McCorkle's new collection are about the battle to stay conscious and be truthful with yourself — to live beyond illusion.

Nasty fun In his books Venus Drive , The Subject Steve , and Home Land , novelist and short-story writer Sam Lipsyte revels in rage.

Girls talk There's only one thing more dangerous than being an ambitious, attractive twentysomething female stumbling through the publishing industry, attempting to secure quantifiable career success and, also, a fantastic boyfriend: the impulse to write about it.

Down and dirty For most sane people, caving is an inexplicable pastime. What, after all, is the appeal of claustrophobic crawls, frigid swims, extreme heights (even underground), oceans of insects, no toilets, and ever-present, absolute darkness?

ON CARPENTRY AND COLLEGE | October 20, 2011 Age 30, I quit the Phoenix and ended up with a job as an apprentice to a carpenter. Sawing, chiseling, hammering, nail-gunning, tiling, sanding, slotting, framing, hauling, measuring, and sweeping are less obvious outcomes of an undergraduate career in the liberal arts. College, in strange and unexpected ways, prepared me for this sort of work. And in others, did not prepare me at all.

PHDISASTERS | April 27, 2011 I knew a man pursuing a PhD in literature. His dissertation had to do with humor as a form of dissent in 20th-century literature. And how enthused he was at first! How passionate and excited.